I’m the kind of girl that you catch sitting in the back row of class reading romance novels. I’m the kind of girl who lays in bed all day watching dramas and emotionally blowing her nose into a clump of tissues when the female lead finally says the words “I do”. I’m the girl whose never had a boyfriend, let alone kissed a boy. I’m the girl who sits at the table filled with middle-aged divorcees, half-drunk on luxurious wine at my older brother’s wedding ceremony. Yes, I’m that girl, the girl with a meaningless fantasy of love, the girl who daydreams of the time of when my “prince charming” will sweep me off my feet and whisk me away.

Sadly, that’s just a mere fantasy of mine that I’ve been holding onto for the past twenty-one years.

The closest thing I have ever had to romantic contact was when I was thirteen and the weird kid in our mathematics class, who was notorious for picking his nose when he assumed that no one was watching, held my hand during lunch. All of my friends teased me after that, and I was determined to prove them wrong, that I wasn’t just going to be the leftovers that nobody wanted. I was going to make every boy in our entire school fall in love with me.

Unfortunately, my genius scheme came back and hit me in the face later on. Literally. By the time I was fourteen to the time I was seventeen, I became the girl that nobody, not even geekiest, nerdiest of any male form, wanted to date. My natural curls wreaked havoc on my scalp, leaving my face hidden behind a curtain of frizz and broken ends, my cheeks and forehead were dotted with red pimples and teeny, tiny little blackheads peppered my nose. My teeth began to shift beyond imagination so I had to wear braces for about two and a half years. I was slightly chubby from all the food my mom crammed into my lunch box every day, and I had to eventually wear glasses once my eyesight evolved and became too blurry to even read a fast food menu.

Basically I was every teenage girl’s worst nightmare.

Every kid in school quietly (and sometimes loudly just so I could hear) giggled and whispered derogatory jokes behind my back, even my trusty friends stabbed me in the back just so they could hang out with the cute popular girls. My best friend Min-ah once taped a slip of pink paper to my back with the words “fat ” scribbled in bold letters, and the entire day I unknowingly walked the halls of my academy with the paper hanging from my cardigan, as male students hollered things such as “nice ” before playfully slapping me across my backside, while female students snorted in amusement when I stood at the bathroom mirror in between classes attempting to dispose of a large pimple on my forehead.

Oh yes, high school was a magnificent torturous device which ruined my wonderful years of adolescence, but I wasn’t about to shame myself for being who I was, despite all of the troubles I faced as a young girl.

Instead of lying in bed crying my life away, as I felt like doing on various occasions, I instead focused my attention on more important, life-altering activities. And those activities were long afternoons of television viewing and novel reading, but not just any genre of television show or novel, the genre; romance. I loved the feeling of lusting over such chiseled actors with deep, y voices, or the rush of my pounding heart as I flipped through the pages of my oh-so treasured novels. After I discovered my love and passion for the genre of romance, I decided to set my life back on track, and moved myself towards the career that I had begun to dream of within the depressing years of my youth. I was going to become an actress.

Of course I had to alter my appearance a smidge, because what logical human would ever desire to see me in a drama unless it was some sort of twisted horror movie, were I played the undead ghoul who jumps from the closet to eat your soul?

After I had made the decision to change my entire self in order to achieve my goal, I began working at my family’s fried chicken restaurant and earned money to fix my hair, buy acne treatments, and sign up for a membership at a local gym. I began taking on small offers to support my aspiring career as an actress, such as television ads or theatrical plays at toddlers’ birthday parties. I focused on upping my grades so that I could possibly waver my parents’ stern beliefs of me attending a normal college, and instead allowing me to attend one of the largest, most infamous performing arts schools in Korea. But get this, the downside to all